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Sunday, November 11, 2012

The Horror

MysteriousPress.com is introducing a new series of stories
called Bibliomysteries. The concept of the series is relatively simple: these
are all relatively short tales centered on some sort of deadly book,
manuscript, etc. Four titles will be released on November 12th by some prominent authors: Anne Perry, C. J. Box, Jeffrey Deaver, and Ken
Bruen all contribute a tale.

In Anne Perry’s The
Scroll, the book that sets the entire plot in motion is the titular scroll.
It all starts with Monty Danforth. He’s an employee at a used bookstore, and
the owner just bought a large crate of books from an estate auction. At the
bottom of the crate lies an ancient scroll, not included among the catalogue of
items. Intrigued, Monty takes a closer look: it looks like an old scroll, and
the language is unfamiliar. Monty decides to photocopy the scroll in order to
get a translation done, but the photocopier refuses to do its job—although it scans
other documents just fine. So he tries to take a picture… and the scroll shows
up clearly on the picture, but the text has vanished.

But before you can say “boo!” in walks an elderly man with
an eight-year-old girl. He introduces himself as Judson Garrett, and offers to
buy the scroll. Monty isn’t sure what to say. He finally tells Garret that he
cannot sell the scroll because there’s a lot of work to be done with the other
books, and besides, his boss needs to set the price. Garrett understands, but
he delivers an ominous warning: “Many people know it is here … They will come
and offer you many things for it… money, but other things as well. Be very
careful what you do with it, Mr. Danforth…”

And of course, Monty gets more strange visitors, each more
eager than the last to purchase the mysterious scroll. Things get really bad
when a murder is committed, and Monty starts to experience disturbingly
apocalyptic visions. All this builds up to an exciting climax. It’s all really
well-done and quite atmospheric.

But as you can perhaps guess, this story focuses more on its
strange/supernatural elements instead of being an “actual” mystery. Viewed from
that perspective, it might even be a disappointment, since the ending is a bit
open and ambiguous and we don’t get a clear answer to all the mysterious events
that have been going on. However, the rest of the story is quite well-written,
and I was willing to forgive this shortcoming.

Anne Perry is a most talented author. The entire tale is
brief, to the point, and has suitable amounts of mystery counterbalanced with
some nice atmosphere. There’s a vague sense of evil, a threat that doesn’t quite make itself known to us, and which
makes the atmosphere all the more interesting. It won’t give me nightmares in
the middle of the night, but it made me concerned as to what would happen next.
One of the signs an author is doing something right is when a reader is eagerly
turning the pages, trying to figure out where all this is headed.

All things considered, I recommend The Scroll. The entire story can easily be read in one sitting, in
under an hour. (According to my Kindle Paperwhite, the estimated time for
reading the whole book is about 45 minutes.) It makes for a quick, pleasant
read: intriguing, suspenseful, and atmospheric. It’s a neat idea and a nice way
for The Mysterious Press to kick off its bibliomysteries. I look forward to
more!

1 comment:

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